How Rwanda's Paul Kagame Exploits U.S. Guilt

Washington's remorse over standing by during the genocide 20 years ago is enabling repression today

ENLARGE

Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, in Brussels on April 2. Mr. Kagame, who led a Tutsi insurgency after the 1994 genocide, was elected to a second term in 2010.
Reuters

By

Howard W. French

Updated April 19, 2014 2:50 p.m. ET

On an early April evening 20 years ago, an airplane carrying the president of Rwanda was mysteriously shot down, and the small Central African country launched itself into a killing spree that would last 100 days. Rwanda's genocide was shocking: close-quarter, hand-to-hand butchery, mostly with machetes and other implements. Some 800,000 people were murdered after members of the country's Tutsi minority were targeted by members of its vast Hutu majority.

As Rwanda has sought to rebuild from the ashes of the genocide, the U.S. has felt a special obligation to the victims. During the early weeks of the slaughter, when foreign intervention had the best chance of halting the bloodshed, President Bill Clinton's administration carefully avoided designating the crisis a genocide so as to duck involvement. (When President Clinton visited Rwanda in 1998, he said that the U.S. "did not act quickly enough after the killing began.")

But today's Rwanda—led by President Paul Kagame, who rose to power as the head of a Tutsi insurgency driving back the Hutu killers in 1994—no longer follows a simple narrative of victims and perpetrators. The longer the U.S. has been guided by that narrative—atoning, in effect, for shirking global leadership during one of the worst mass slaughters of the past century—the more it has become complicit in crimes and misdeeds in Rwanda ever since.

A pattern of U.S. indulgence was established in the earliest days of the post-genocide period, when Mr. Kagame was establishing his authority throughout the country. During those first months, Mr. Kagame's army, composed almost entirely of minority Tutsi, conducted its own mass slaughters across Rwanda, rounding up unarmed Hutu civilians by the thousands and machine-gunning them. These acts were documented at the time by international human rights workers and U.N. experts on the ground. The Kagame government has bristled at accusations of human rights abuses, saying it acted on behalf of the victims of the genocide. (The Rwandan government did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this article.)

A seasoned U.N. investigator, Robert Gersony, estimated that as many as 35,000 Hutu were killed in this manner between April and September 1994 in the 28% of the country that his team surveyed. "What we found," an investigator who took part in the survey told me, "was a well-organized, military style operation, with military command and control, and these were military campaign style mass murders." But the U.N. never released the report. Human Rights Watch reported that the U.S. "concurred in this decision, largely to avoid weakening the new Rwandan government."

Many historians of Rwanda say that this set a powerful precedent of impunity for the new Kagame regime—and paved the way for larger crimes.

Mr. Kagame moved to consolidate his power, with U.S. and other foreign aid accounting for virtually all of the country's budget in 1995. (That figure stands today at 40%, according to the World Bank.) He quickly set about eliminating sources of opposition and criticism throughout Rwanda. Under his rule, independent-minded journalists were jailed or chased into exile. In 1997, Appolos Hakizimana, the editor of a magazine that had criticized the Rwandan military, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen. Rival political leaders (such as Pasteur Bizimungu, the titular but largely powerless president in the late 1990s, and Victoire Ingabire in the last election) were imprisoned; some rival parties have been banned.

Meanwhile, with tacit U.S. support, Mr. Kagame launched a pair of wars against neighboring Zaire (later renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo). The rationale for the first of these conflicts, in 1996, was that Zaire harbored thousands of armed perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide who were bent on revenge. But Mr. Kagame went beyond hunting down genocidaires, and Rwandan intervention in Congo became habit-forming, at a devastating cost in human lives.

The International Rescue Committee estimates that more than five million people have died since 1998 as a result of the wars and campaign of destabilization waged by Mr. Kagame in Congo. Perhaps the most troubling fact of these conflicts has been Rwanda's pursuit of coldblooded ethnic revenge. Congo has repeatedly accused Rwanda of interference in its affairs; Rwanda says Congo's weak government has done too little to root out Hutu extremists who took part in the 1994 genocide.

In 2010, an exhaustive U.N. report on a decade of Rwandan-sponsored conflict in Congo revealed that Mr. Kagame's forces had carried out a highly targeted campaign against Rwandan and native Congolese Hutu, some of whom had fled to Congo after the genocide. Some experts have put the death toll as high as 300,000 people. The overwhelming majority of these victims, according to the report, were unarmed, including large numbers of women, children and the elderly. (The Rwandan government called the U.N. report "outrageous" and "amateurish.")

As a foreign correspondent at the time, I followed these people as they crossed the enormous breadth of Congo by foot, their numbers dwindling as they came under attack by Rwandan forces and fell from disease. But the U.S. ambassador to Congo at the time, Daniel Howard Simpson, said that humanitarian concern about these refugees was misplaced. "They are the bad guys," he told me in 1997, justifying Washington's silence. Years later, the U.N.'s investigation reached a different conclusion: "The apparent systematic and widespread attacks described in this report reveal a number of inculpatory elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be characterized as crimes of genocide."

Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian scholar and leading expert on Rwanda, wrote last year that Mr. Kagame, for all his "vision and ambition," was "probably the worst war criminal in office today." But 20 years after the genocide, Mr. Kagame—tall, gaunt and severe-looking—tours U.S. college campuses, where he receives honorary degrees and is toasted by the great and the good of the Western world.

Western sympathy and guilt over the genocide explain much of this, but Mr. Kagame also has excelled at conveying an image of Rwanda as something new to Africa: a capable, technocratic state dedicated to good governance, a regional financial hub and an Internet-for-all society. "They are extremely adept in speaking a discourse that Westerners want to hear," said Catharine Newbury, a Rwanda specialist at Smith College.

Rwanda remains extremely poor, but it has recently sustained fast growth rates, and health care, longevity, education and gender equality have improved strongly. Still, Mr. Kagame is best seen not as a modernizing technocrat but as an unapologetic autocrat. He bullies his neighbors, rewards his cronies and menaces dissidents.

The U.S. State Department says that it is troubled by what appear to be the politically motivated killings of a number of high-profile Rwandan exiles. When Rwanda's former spy chief was found dead in a Johannesburg hotel in January, Mr. Kagame denied any involvement but added, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, "I actually wish Rwanda did it. I really wish it."

The country's ruling party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, also controls a vast array of business interests in Rwanda, experts say—managed totally off-budget. "Kagame is the only one who knows how much money this is or how it is spent," said Theogene Rudawingwa, a dissident in exile who was once Mr. Kagame's chief of staff.

Recently, U.S. diplomats have taken Mr. Kagame to task for supporting militias in Congo. But critics say that Washington must go much further to improve the course of post-genocide Rwanda. With Mr. Kagame approaching the end of his constitutional term limits in 2017, a big opportunity looms. "There has to be an uncompromising position on opening up political space in the country and ending the destabilization of the Congo," said Scott Straus, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. "I don't think it will be easy, but more of the same isn't going to work."

Mr. French is a professor at Columbia Journalism School, a former New York TimesNYT0.15% foreign correspondent and the author of "China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa," to be published by Knopf in May.

Professor Reyntjens is quoted as saying that Rwandan President Paul Kagame is "probably the worst war criminal in office today." That is quite a charge, especially given the long-list of criminals holding office today.

If WSJ article by Howard French, and the Newsweek article are indeed factually correct, then (1) the U.S. indeed should be arresting Kagame on sight for trial for crimes against humanity, and (2) vaunted institutions like Cooper Union College have had scales on their eyes and should issue a statement of re-examination and repentance for hosting a such a disturbing individual.

Our guilt isn't unfounded. We didn't uphold the Genocide Convention. It's not a matter of national self interest it's a matter of upholding treaty obligations. While Kagame isn't a saint, the silencing of Hutu power parties in Rwanda post 1994 might be compared to the outlawing of the Nazi party in Germany after the end of World War II. While Rwanda's response to the Congolese crisis may not have been proportional, the fact remains that former genocidaires were entering into Rwandan sovereign territory and routinely killing and raping Rwandan citizens. We would hardly be expected to remain inactive if a similar action was being perpetrated against American citizens from a base in a neighboring country. While there is a case to be made that Kagame has committed war crimes, this article overstates it.

Liberal "feel-sorry" policy is not a foreign policy that anyone anywhere in the world can count on when trouble is brewing. It is an arm-chaired view of events after they occur, with the requisite sermonizing on right and wrong. In regards to Rwanda, liberals and blacks in this country complained in this paper and in Congress that only black Africans knew what was right for Africa. After all when South Africa's policy of apartheid ended, the US was told not to intervene in what was then domestic policy; the daily murder of white farmers and anyone black who was deemed opposed to Mrs. Mandela.

The US was right to refrain from intervening in Rwanda, regardless of what happened there, for it was in no way tied to anything that could be remotely considered a national security interest of the US. Therefore, if anything is to be criticized, it is the way the leftist mandarins of political correctness have successfully manufactured Western guilt from thin air, as they so often do.

What Westerners should be genuinely ashamed of is that they have elected into power governments that squander taxpayer money such a ludicrous and indefensible manner as to finance 40% of the budget of an irrelevant potentate in Africa, simply because the population there is prone to spasms of violence and the West chose not to invade to protect them from themselves.

If you cut away all the nonsense, these murderers are basically beggars for money from the US. They know that US politicians can spend our tax money with impunity, (just review Michelle's family vacations for recent examples), so why not? We historically give away dollars and get nothing in return. And now that we have Obama, anything African has a special appeal.

Many surveys have been conducted on the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. One of the most serious one was undoubtedly led by Mena , from 2002, which ended with the publication of nearly 140 analyzes and other documents. They have established the answer to three basic questions: the French government he actively participated with his elect its diplomats and his army in the preparation of genocide? In his coaching ? A scripts ?

For all people of good faith , the simple reading of Article summary Unacceptable , but certainly imprescriptible " and its links , initially released in August 2008 and we are republishing today leads beyond doubt supposed to meet three times yes to these questions.

Three times , not twice or one ; not the tip of the tongue ; no superficial or blurred manner, but supporting , through evidence and testimony gathered on the spot and even in neighboring Congo , the terrible truth: France has committed genocide , there is barely twenty years old , participating with his commandos , legionaries , helicopters, jeeps and machine guns, the annihilation of about 800,000 unarmed innocent of all ages in four months. This is a rate greater than that of the Nazis and their industrial extermination of Jews during the entire Second World Conflict .

What frightens most about this is that crime was committed almost without cause, and without the targets of the French Army had never made ??any security threat and even less political or military for France . So many dead, only because a French president , whose activities had already earned him the Frantz during the Occupation , harbored antipathy for Tutsis.

And because, in a French political system worn , giving lately signs of incurable terminal in an apparatus in which corruption , profiteering , cronyism , mediocrity, the excessive ambitions and servility reign supreme no one has had the ability , or just the balls to refuse to carry out criminal orders of François Mitterrand.

Cohabitation requires , at the time the Hexagon was right in the left-right cleavage does not throw responsibility to the head; we keep , on the contrary , as many bombs, what we know about the attitude of "others" in the realization of the African ethnocide 94.

Very many current politicians participated - to one degree or another - the attempted extermination of the Tutsis ; include Villepin, Juppé (Minister of Foreign Affairs during the genocide ) or Kouchner, but it would be almost unfair , as there are many.

Since 94 , unable to explain his actions , the official France and the insane attacks or discredits those who report the facts. But politics France is not the only cause , it is followed in its denial by most intellectuals , and much of the main stream media , the most cowardly and agreed to press the democratic world.

At the time of publication of our investigation , strictly no French media did not share our conclusions. Then today, when almost triumphant , our colleagues announced the sentence to 25 years enclose a paraplegic by the French justice for his role in the genocide Hutu captain, actually they not understand that judges sent galleys to a third violin in the orchestra accomplices and allies of France in 1994? And in doing so, but for far more serious offenses , it should also condemn the surviving half of French politics?

But we do not kill children with impunity , and even if this is not necessarily haunted by the blood of his victims - for that you need a conscience! - Whose blood on the roads of Rwanda , spread such streams , I belong to those who are convinced that the burnt kill as executioners their victims . But they kill the second low heat , reducing rot everything around them, forcing them to prostitution heart of all those - women , children, parents - they may have been like .

The U.S. did not fail to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide; it backed Kagame all the way, after training hi at Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College, before he invaded Rwanda with regiments of the Ugandan army in October 1990. Kagame ordered his troops on the ground in Rwanda to shoot down the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents home from signing a peace agreement in Arusha, Tanzania, then further violated the peace agreement by resuming his advance on Kigali. No one is more to blame for what then happened in Kigali and other parts of Southern Rwanda than Kagame himself. He was also responsible for massacres, mostly massacres of Hutu people, in the North, before he ordered the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents.

So the US is terrible because it didn't intervene when a genocide was happening, now the US is terrible because it is somehow intervening and a genocide is happening? Good old US realpolitik would be more understandable and might even have a lower body count. Just get the US out and let the Europeans spend pointless foreign aid and do the hand wringing.

Mr. Kagame sounds like any number of brutal dictators and murderers we've supported throughout our history. Based on our track record, we've been really good at this. It'd be hypocritical for us to single him out.

Very good article, the first one I've seen that approaches the truth of what has happened in Rwanda and Congo over the past two decades. Kagame is no saint, and he has made himself the richest man in the country.

The Third World is characterized by barbarous savagery and ruthlessly insane warlords with no human empathies. It is a lie to say all people and all cultures are equally good. All Third World peoples are different and most are not good. They know only the rule of force and will kill thousands without the least bit of remorse or regret.

We wee similarities between Idi Amin, Papa and Baby Doc, North Korea's leaders, all the Muslim potentates, and Obama in that all these men are arrogant megalomaniacs believing themselves gods on earth, contemptuous of restraint and law, resorting to threats and violence against their political enemies. It is why all our Federal agencies are equipping themselves with para-military agents, armed with military weapons, and provoking citizens guilty of minor misdemeanors, hoping to trigger a violent exchange which will justify more brutal tactics and restrictions on constitutional rights.

We pray for the day America will turn again toward office holders believing in Western Civilization, our constitution, and the rule of law.

Agreed.But since there's no template for it...what should that look like in practice?BTW...you are aware that there's a war machine in this great nation that has weapons and training to sell.Think they'd go for your new paradigm shift?Should your proposal apply to all situations...or just those involving African strongmen?

Most weapons used in those savageries you describe are carried out by weapons manufactured in the west as multinational from the west get deals when a strong man takes power.Go figure, there is more to the story...

The President should have the shift as part of his policy for Africa otherwise the US will continue to lose grounds to China in Africa deals...the war machine will figure out other ways to survive or disappear for Africa...

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